It's a raw Friday afternoon in December, and the scene at the corner of South Orange Avenue and South 10th Street is typical Newark, with a chicken shack and a liquor store on one side, a bodega and an abandoned building on the other, and traffic -- both foot and automotive -- hurrying past.

Then Tyrone Muhammad's van pulls up.

Suddenly cars are crawling past, their drivers craning their necks. A woman walking into the chicken shack does a double-take. Three guys who had been hanging out on a stoop half-way up the block are on their way down to have a look. Two women coming out of the liquor store stop and gawk.

"You see that?" says Christine Velez, one of the gawkers.

"What," says Nancy Smith, her friend.

"Right there," Velez says, pointing.

The object of all the fuss is a van with flashing lights. It is wrapped in a variety of colorful graphics -- pictures, newspaper headlines and so on. Its front hood is painted with a logo, "Morticians That Care." And on top of the van, bolted to the roof, is a casket.

It's a real casket, one that was constructed to carry real dead people until it was mounted atop Muhammad's used Ford Econoline-250 and turned into an unusual combination of street art, conversation piece and social protest.

For Morticians That Care, the anti-violence group Muhammad founded and hopes to spread across the state and nation, the casket is more than just a calling card. It's also a message: Unless something is done to disrupt the unholy trinity of guns, gangs and drugs that is plaguing urban America, more young people are going to end up coffins like the one on their van.

"It's an eye-catcher. Everywhere we go, it stops traffic," says Muhammad, a 38-year-old Newark resident who works part time as a mortician, full time as a PSE&G customer service representative and in-between-time as a street activist. "Some people say it's gruesome or morbid. Some people say it's controversial. But I like stirring up controversy."

This particular Friday is no different, as Muhammad and Kenny Reece, the other principle member of Morticians That Care, begin their act, one they take to street corners, housing projects, youth groups -- whoever might listen. Sometimes they're invited places. On this day, they've invited themselves.

They start by rolling another casket from the back of the van. The body bags come next. Lately they've been using three body bags, a tribute to the three college students slain in a Newark school yard last summer. But they've used as many as eight or 10. Their slogan is, "How many body bags will it take?"

Then, before the sermonizing, they hook up speakers and begin playing what Reece calls "consciousness-raising music." First it's Sly and the Family Stone singing, "It's a family affair." Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes take over after that.

"The world won't get no better if we just let it be," the song goes. "The world won't get no better. We got to change it, yeah, just you and me ..."

A violent death
Change the world. It's something Muhammad -- who has a 16-year-old daughter, Trinity, and is married to Annette, who has an 8-year-old daughter, N'Kayla -- now feels compelled to do. But it might also be something he was raised to do.

His mother, Betty Campbell, brought him up in Jersey City on a steady diet of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and old copies of the Pittsburgh Courier-Journal, a crusading black newspaper.

Then, when he was 12, two things happened that eventually launched him toward anti-violence activism.

First, he got beat up. As he tells it, he was trying to show a new girl from Ecuador how kids in Jersey City wore their pants -- down low, sagging off the butt. What got back to the girl's family is that a boy had been pulling his pants down in front of their daughter.

The girl's family grabbed Muhammad as he came out of school, beating him and burning his face with a cigarette butt. Muhammad was rescued by a passing motorist, and his family later sued the school district for not providing better security.

A couple of months after that, Muhammad's father was murdered. According to neighborhood rumors at the time, William Johnson was killed by the jealous husband of a woman he may or may not have been fooling around with. He was 44.

"I saw him in the casket and he looked so peaceful," Muhammad says. "I didn't really understand all the things the mortician had done to make him look peaceful. I was only 12. I'm not sure I really understood he had died a violent death."

Years later, when Muhammad was working at the funeral home that did his father's arrangements, he went back into the archives and found the autopsy report for William Johnson. That's when he learned his father was stabbed repeatedly in the chest and staggered into Journal Square, where he bled to death on the street.

Patching bullet holes
Still, it wasn't a straight path from there to street corner preaching for Muhammad. He tried it for a little while in high school, founding a group called Soldiers for Christ.

But it didn't stick. After high school, he used the proceeds of his lawsuit settlement to open a grocery store and pool hall in Jersey City. He enrolled in community college, then tried preaching again, this time enrolling at Manhattan Bible Institute in Harlem.

That didn't stick, either. He converted to Islam after listening to recordings of Louis Farrakhan in a Jersey City barbershop. Then he enrolled in nursing school.

In 1994, his mother died, and the experience of dealing with funeral homes -- one he didn't find very pleasant -- motivated him to go into the business.

All of which led him to the day when the desire to change the world really grabbed hold of him. It was March 2004. Amir Wilkins, a 17-year-old from Irvington, had been killed by a single gunshot to the head on the street in Newark.

And Muhammad, who had recently completed mortuary school and was interning at Cotton Funeral Home in Newark, was the one who had to make the young man look like he had died peacefully. Just like someone once did for Muhammad's father.

Muhammad set about his work like usual. By then he had gotten altogether too much practice covering up gunshot wounds: combining wax and cold cream, heating up the mixture so it becomes workable, filling and smoothing the wound, applying makeup that blended with the deceased's skin color.

And it finally got to him.

"As I was dressing him, I was thinking about how many young people were coming into the funeral home," Muhammad says. "It seemed like it was 15 or 20 a year. And I just realized I was tired of patching up bullet holes."

The casket van
Over the last three years, Morticians That Care has gone from an idea over a mortuary table to a reality. Muhammad, who is now funeral director at Peace and Glory Home for Funerals in Newark, incorporated Morticians That Care as a nonprofit. He then found a kindred soul in Reece, a boiler room operator for the City of Newark who has a side business making wooden caskets for Muslim funerals.

But it was the casket van that really made things go. Muhammad got the idea from an anti-smoking demonstration and floated the idea by his wife, Annette.

"When I told my wife, she was like, 'You're going to do what?" Muhammad said. "But then the more she thought about it, the more she was like, 'You're right. That's hot."

Muhammad ended up financing the thing himself: $8,000 for a used van, $3,100 for the graphics on the side, $1,000 for the flashing lights, $450 to attach the casket.

"We just wanted to do anything we could to bring awareness of the high death rate due to gang and gun violence," Muhammad says. "People have just become so immune to death, it's like life doesn't even matter anymore. We want to send the message it does matter. Maybe we're not going to save the world. But maybe we can save a few kids."

They do it by being as forthright as possible, telling young people what a cadaver with a bullet wound really looks like, inviting kids to lie in coffins then reminding them how easily they could end up in one permanently if they start running with gangs.

One of Muhammad's recent programs was with the Street Warriors, a group of ex-cons who work with at-risk youth.

"The reason he gets to those kids is he gives it to them straight," says Earl "The Street Doctor" Best, one of the Street Warriors' founders. "Kids love a straight shooter."

Muhammad and Reece have also spoken to Covenant House, Weequahic High School, Women in Support of the Million Man March and a variety of other local groups, including a stop at the Seth Boyden public housing project with Bill Cosby. But they consider their street corner work the real core of what they do.

"We want the community to be outraged," says Muhammad. "If something like this happened in the white community, it wouldn't be tolerated. They'd be calling in the National Guard, forming protest marches. But it happens here and no one does anything."

He continues: "We had a rally at City Hall a few days after those kids were killed in the school yard. You know how many people showed up? Seventy. If it had been a cookout, we would have gotten 500."

Closer to home
Then again, there are times when Muhammad finds himself facing a smaller yet equally demanding audience: His daughter, Trinity.

"My daughter, she asks me all the time, 'Why are so many black people killing each other?' As a father, how do you answer that?" Muhammad says.

He tries, of course. He talks about the complicated history of African-Americans in this country, about the lack of economic opportunity for poor urban blacks, about what he calls the "self-hatred" that leads to black-on-black crime, about the deleterious effects of rap videos, about the need for young black men to step up for their families and communities.

They're the same kind of subjects he preaches about on street corners, the subjects academics and politicians talk about all the time. But, from his vantage point alongside a mortician's table -- where the result of all that violence is laid out before him, cold and dead -- he sees things they don't see.

And what keeps him going is that maybe, if he can make enough people aware of that reality, they will be as outraged as he is. And maybe that will mean fewer young black men on his table.

"You know what I think about sometimes? I think about my daughter," Muhammad says. "She's 16. If young black men keep getting killed, who is she going to marry?"

Additional insight: Favorite book: "The Coldest Winter Ever" by Sister Souljah Favorite time of day: "Sometimes I'm up at 2, 3 o'clock in the morning thinking of ways to take Morticians That Care to the next level." Hidden talent: Playing the trumpet Philosophy in customer service/life: "Treat other people as I want to be treated. That sums up everything for me."